SALEM, OR—According to sources, local atheist Mitch Matthews was delighted to experience an artificial sense of awe and wonder, produced by the random release of neurochemicals in his purposeless and haphazardly evolved brain, while watching Monday’s total solar eclipse.

The enlightened man, who believes his consciousness and intellect developed inadvertently over billions of years, felt a sense of admiration generated by random molecules transferring across millions of synapses in his highly complex brain tissue, arbitrarily arranged in a completely random fashion, and clearly not the result of any intelligent design.

“That was amazing!” Matthews reportedly told witnesses, as the release of neurohormones gave a strong sense of astonishment to the man whose pointless existence depends on the sun and moon randomly being the perfect size and distance from Earth to produce today’s eclipse, and to sustain life at all. “Wow, it makes you feel so small!”

At publishing time, Matthews had returned to his usual method for producing an artificial sense of pleasure, triggered by the endorphins released as he argued with religious people online.